Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/281

 stared around with a vacant look without seeing what was near and about him, and at last he burst into ghastly laughter.

An old woman took him along to her little house, and looked after the poor crazy one. Soon he no longer laughed so horribly, but yet he did not speak. Only during the night those who shared the hut with him were startled awake by his voice, when he sang in a toneless manner—“I know not where I shall die.” Some of the inhabitants of Badoor put money together to pay for a sacrifice to the alligators of the Tjioodyoong for the recovery of Saïdyah, who was looked upon as demented.

But demented he was not.

For one night when the moon shone brightly, he rose from his stretcher, and stole softly out of the house, and searched for the place where Adinda had lived. It was not easy to find, as so many houses had fallen into ruins. But he seemed to recognize the place from the width of the angle which some of the lines of light between the trees formed in meeting his eye, as the sailor takes his bearings from certain beacons or from prominent mountain-heights.

Yes, it must be there there it was that Adinda had lived!

Stumbling over half-decayed bamboos and fragments of the fallen roof, he cleared for himself a way to the sanctuary he sought. And indeed, he still found portions of the upright fence next to which Adinda’s stretcher had stood, and stuck in this fence there was still the bamboo pin on which she had hung her garment when she lay down to sleep

But the stretcher had fallen in like the house, and was almost decayed to dust. He picked up a handful of it, pressed it to his open lips, and breathed very deeply

Next day he asked the old woman who had looked after him where the rice-block was that had stood on the ground of Adinda’s house. The woman was rejoiced to hear him speak, and went all over the village to find that block. When she was able to tell Sadyah who was the new owner, he followed her silently, and,